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An anonymous reader writes "A spate of broken cables has brought disruption for many of the world's Web users in 2008 — and the Med has been at the center of the problems. For political reasons, the Mediterranean Sea is an Internet bottleneck through which the majority of traffic between Europe and Asia is squeezed. That traffic must run the gauntlet of earthquakes and heavy maritime traffic to reach its destination. Better and stronger cables are urgently needed to avoid a re-occurrence of the 2008 outages."

It sounds more like this is the internet's jugular vein or carotid artery than the achilles heel, just to pointlessly analyze the metaphor. I would think the achilles heel would be people who still don't know not to click the monkey or open attachments from addresses they don't know.

Becuase Radia Perlman held the Internet by the Mediterranean when she dipped it into the river Styx?

Goodness gracious. I can't believe that after all these millennia that people still haven't learned the most basic lesson of the story of Achilles: When dipping something into the Styx, use tongs so you can dip it all the way without getting your hand wet!

Please cite sources. I'm googling right now (hurray slow work day) but I'd be interested to see some real conspiracies that there were conspiracy theorists for before it all came out. Active conspiracy theories have yet to be proven as actually happening or have happened.

I saw a program about a guy that was actually taken prisoner for stumbling onto a fairly major conspiracy in order to keep him quiet. He had discovered that flu vaccine was being tainted in order to send people into a shopping frenzy just before the holiday season. He was taken to an island with others that had stumbled onto various things that couldn't be allowed to slip into public knowledge (the secret for turning water into gasoline, etc).

IIRC, he escaped on a boat built by another prisoner (Number 6) that was built out of toilet paper and scabs. It was small and smelly, but carried him to safety.

Oh, sure, I'm certain the government has the internet monitored, so that any time the word 'Nebraska' is seen, they have some reply, if needed, to prove there's regular people in/from 'Nebraska'.

Now, I've personally met folks from North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas (my wife!), Wyoming, Missouri, Iowa, etc. But never met anyone from 'Nebraska'. I think, during WWII, they sent everyone over seas or to Army bases in CA and, with an empty state, started using it as a really large version of Area 51. Who knows w

Actually, come to think of it, anything on this list [wikipedia.org] would qualify as a conspiracy and, until being proved out, anyone suggesting the truth would have looked like a conspiracy theory nutjob.

Active conspiracy theories have yet to be proven as actually happening or have happened.

This definition sets us up for a long argument trying to classify edge cases, which may or may not result in me demonstrating a nice clean example of something that you class as a conspiracy theory later being shown to be factual. That would be an interesting point to make, but not one that I'm willing to spend a bunch of time researching right now.

I'm much more interested in cases where things that do not meet that def

In the 90s it was backhoes. Now it's giant cable-eating squid. What next, volcanic eruptions? Really, the problem is two-fold -- first, cables break. Hey, it's several thousand miles long and several thousand feet down, and it's just laying there. Of course it's going to break. You could make the cables out of Unobtainium and they will still wither and break eventually. It's a fact of life. The real problem isn't that they fail, the problem is that the telecommunications companies don't have redundant links because of the expense. So, in summary, the problem is economics. And Cthulu. But you can't stop one of the great old ones, so let's focus on redundant links instead. -_-

He Who Lies Dead but Dreaming has no part to play in the damage to undersea cables, I have this on good authority. The Telcos are actually agents of Cthulhu (duh! -- you should know this by now if you've ever called telco tech support); the internet is just one of his dreams, which will serve to increase chaos and drive us all to madness.

Seriously, though, blaming the problem on economics is a copout. Why are costs to lay redundant cables so high? What can be done to convince the telcos that laying redundant cables is a good idea? What can tip the CBA to the B side?(br>There are lots of reasons a truly redundant system is prohibitively expense. The cost of negotiating rights-of-way through multiple nations, for example. The increased costs to shipping (external cost to the telcos) from avoiding cable paths (and this is magnified with true redundancy, since redundant cables should not follow the same path). The costs of running and maintaining landlines in politically unstable areas. And, not least of all, the costs in materials, capital, and labor to run redundant lines.

The way to tip the scale in favor of running redundant lines is to either reduce the cost of doing so, or increase the benefit from doing so. How much money do the telcos lose when a line goes down? Over time, is that more than the cost of running redundant lines?

So yes, it's economics, but saying it's economics is glossing over the important details.

Not all of us type "KeyserSoze 10000" at the console whenever faced with a gold shortage.

Why are costs to lay redundant cables so high?

Perhaps designing something that is several thousand miles long, and under several hundred PSI of pressure, to lay at the bottom of an environment that contains sulphuric acid plumbs, volcanic pits, and large numbers of angry monsters, is not easy.

What can be done to convince the telcos that laying redundant cables is a good idea? What can tip the CBA to the B side?

Threats of violence, regulation, and regular bombing of the opposition has worked well for us in other areas.

How much money do the telcos lose when a line goes down? Over time, is that more than the cost of running redundant lines?

Obviously, it is not more than the cost of running redundant lines or they would have done so by now.

So yes, it's economics, but saying it's economics is glossing over the important details.

Circular logic works because circular logic works because circular logic works because circular logic works because circular logic works because...

The current model is that most providers lease space from a competitor for the time it takes to repair their own link. That's a hell of a lot cheaper than laying extra cable, or allowing your service to go completely dead. Ownership of the cable (like terrestrial lines) is a web of consortiums and leaseholds that make the cost of providing some redundancy a lot less than 2X.

Just in the 90's? Gee, our internet connection got cut last year by a backhoe.

Actually, it doesn't take an anchor per se to cut a cable. If the anchor is tethered by a steel wire cable instead of a chain, the steel cable will chew right through the fiber-optic cable, no matter how many layers of armor it has. The anchor itself doesn't have to do the cutting.

The real problem isn't that they fail, the problem is that the telecommunications companies don't have redundant links because of the expense.

Last time this came up, somebody in the field posted that the cables just aren't shielded in most locations, because of the expense. There are apparently best practices that have certain pipes or something wrapped around the cables in anchor areas, and certain depths they're supposed to bury the cables at, but they just skip those parts.

I never had any issues any of the times this happened. I was able to do all the stuff I normally do and visit all the sites I normally visits. This leads me to conclude that the solution is rather simple. The people who are affected by these outages should do something.

The article seems a little alarmist. For instance, this line:
"The 2008 outages hit local economies hard and a stronger quake could plausibly bring Mediterranean economies to their knees, by denying them access to crucial global markets for days or weeks.
A 2005 study at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich calculated that a nationwide internet blackout would cost Switzerland 1% of its GDP per week."
But of course a cut in the Mediterranean will not be a "nationwide internet blackout" for Switzerland much at all. In fact, if India and the mid-east gets cut off from the rest of the Internet, the rest of the world won't care all that much.

That'll teach companies to move their jobs overseas. Those companies(and their overpaid executives) can cry a river to the employees they laid off only to give their jobs to India. Mods: I ask you to think about this before you mod me down, but if you want to waste your points, I don't give a fuck!:) Have a nice day.

I understand your sentiment, but what you're ultimately suggesting is that we eliminate access to the internet for any country with a cheap labor pool. This punishes the citizens of those countries more than it does the execs of the major corporations that exploit them.

This story is about an international communications issue. If you want to talk about labor issues I would say this:

There are many powerful people trying to make protectionism a dirty word, if we want to fight them we have to be specific in our demands on who deserves Free Trade agreements or gets Preferred Trade Status. Protecting workers rights "over there" means increasing labor costs "over there" and makes them less appealing than local workers when you factor in communications and shipping costs (environmental protections should also figure into that equation). When they can treat their employees humanely, pay them a living wage, stop tainting the local water supply and still afford to send products to our markets cheaper than we can, then they deserve those jobs and we don't.

The problem is that we've spotted our competitors a huge advantage by not holding them to any of the standards we hold ourselves to. Which means we tied our own hands, or maybe slit our own throats.

I understand your sentiment, but what you're ultimately suggesting is that we eliminate access to the internet for any country with a cheap labor pool.

I heard it as a complaint that the CEOs are looking to short-term gains and not counting the very real risk that network connectivity from the US to India may be impaired at some points. If they didn't examine and account for that risk in their calculations, then they are incompetent or liars (or both).

When they can treat their employees humanely, pay them a living wage, stop tainting the local water supply and still afford to send products to our markets cheaper than we can, then they deserve those jobs and we don't.

Which is why the US should have tarrifs on a per-country basis related to worker conditions and environmental care. If they "externalize" industry cost by dumping toxins rather than cleaning or storing them, then we should increase the cost here by that amount. They can pay for good practices or we will charge them so that they would be making the same if they did.

Well, to be fair, India and China can always choose not to outsource to the U.S. 20 years from now when they're rich and mighty.

It works both ways as long as so much depends on some little string threaded through the Ocean. Companies could stay rooted in one nation and deal with the ups and downs(with the benefits of academia and defense employment), or they could constantly go in circles chasing the cheap through constant relocation.

A gauntlet is "a heavy glove, often armored" or "a glove with a heavy cuff covering part of the arm." To throw down the gauntlet is to challenge someone; to pick up the gauntlet is to accept someone's challenge.

A gantlet is "a lane between two lines of people armed with staves or whips, through which someone being punished is forced to run while being clubbed or whipped by the people on either side" (run the gantlet) and, figuratively, "any series of trials and difficulties.

Actually gauntlet is the preferred spelling for both, although the etymology behind the use of gauntlet for punishment is different (the first meaning is from French, the second from Spanish). Gantlet is also correct, although archaic, for both.

According to the all-powerful Google:define [google.com] (and the Oxford Dictionary [askoxford.com]), gantlet appears to be an alternative spelling of Gauntlet. They do, in fact, mean the same thing(s).

And here I thought a 'Gantlet' was a chart which showed exactly when you would be hit with whips and staves, so that each hit would come after the ones before it and only when there were enough people and whips available to do it.

If you are not sure whether you should throw down the gantlet or the gauntlet, don't throw in the towel. There are two words spelled gauntlet and both have gantlet as a spelling variant, so you can't go wrong.

Some confusion exists about the status of these spelling variants. The argument is sometimes heard that they represent etymologically distinct words, and that gantlet is the only correct choice--or at least the preferable one--in the common phrase run the ga(u)ntlet. This argument is mi

Though there is abviously no excuse for the cables that have been there for a while with newer cables you often find that they have been layed straight through what was once an anchorage as they get closer to shore and nobody has "gotten around" to updating any of the charts yet. I had this situation in the Azores a while back when we anchored in what was shown in all charts and publications to be the only anchorage available only to be met on the dock by a not so friendly police man shouting something in Portuguese along the lines of we just laid a load of fiber optic cables through there and your anchor is on top of them... of course we moved immediately into the port which was what we planed to do in the afternoon but when we asked the Harbour Master why there had been no notice to mariners about the new cabled a shrug of the shoulders was the most informative answer we could get.

>> Better and stronger cables are urgently needed to avoid a re-occurrence of the 2008 outages."...Except I seem to recall that it appeared to be deliberate sabotage, as in both big cases of the Mediterranean outages, multiple key cables all went down within hours of each other after years of no problems.

Just laying stronger cables obviously won't make much of a difference if it was indeed sabotage.

Partially tongue-in-cheek, partially serious....but my Internet in the US works just fine to connect to other US destinations likely without passing through the Mediterranean. 99.9% of my destinations are US-based and hosted - I know the US isn't the center of the world, but this sounds like an Achilles' Heel for the *other* side of the world:-P

What if your favorite DNS server happens to use a multicast address, and for some strange routing reasons, your queries get routed to the other side of the world... perhaps through the Med, every now and then? Or if you even happend to be an mDNS [multicastdns.org] early adopter/tester/developer/..., and the same happens?
And even if you didn't look so far, network links get congested, and traffic could easily overflow to peering networks, and this could very well mean, that ISP A and ISP B, both in the US, transmit packets

Seems to me if they had more landings (eg multiple landings per country per cable) then it would be more robust. Probably most of the breaks happen close-ist to shore so have a backbone in the middle (or 10 miles out) at a landing every so often.

Europe and Asia are connected by land. While it might have to divert around a few non-cooperative countries, you'd think that sufficient backbone could be laid down over land routes to all necessary countries. It seems like underwater cables would be used only when absolutely necessary (such as from North America to Europe or Austrialia to Asia - and even then satellite is available (though with higher latency and lower bandwidth).

It also seems like it might be more expensive and/or complicated to lay cable overland for thousands of miles versus underwater for thousands of miles. Think about what moves on the sea floor. Now think about what moves around on earth's surface. Now think about getting a right-of-way across Asia and coordinating with all the governments and private landowners that you'd have to deal with. So I think it is probably easier just to drop a cable under the ocean, since it's going to be more protected from peopl

according to an article (referenced below, very entertaining article which I suggest you read when you have the time), laying undersea cable a bit safer than overland, because "anyone with a bulldozer" can be a fool and do damage to your line.

Why sea cables? Europe and Asia are connected by land. While it might have to divert around a few non-cooperative countries, you'd think that sufficient backbone could be laid down over land routes to all necessary countries.

Because laying land cables is extraordinarily expensive - after all, sea bed is free while someone owns the land. Another problem is that you'll be laying cable across some pretty tough and inhospitable terrain far from civilization, which raises maintenance costs considerably. Final

Europe and Asia are connected by land. While it might have to divert around a few non-cooperative countries, you'd think that sufficient backbone could be laid down over land routes to all necessary countries.

Well, lets exclude Iraq, Iran, and Afganistan. Then exclude running a cable over the Himilayas. Then you pretty much have to run it undeasea to get to India. Even if you did try a Himilayan route, that would probably end up going through China. How's that great firewall coming? Want to get it in

Run cables all throughout Europe (if they aren't there already) and then run the cables down through Greece, Turkey and other friendly countries into the Red Sea and through to Asia or so.I see no reason why the cables have to run down the length of the Mediterranean (up until you hit Turkey or so, all the countries it would need to run through are part of the EU now so it would be easy to just draw up an EU wide set of rules for it)

Whatever happened to the idea that the Internet routes around damage? I can no longer connect to vesti.ru because the route from my ISP to Moscow goes through Telia's routers and they no longer peer with Russia either through design, damage, or poor maintenance. Shouldn't the packets get rerouted if a particular link is down?

If performance to half way round the world was comparable to performance locally, oh what a world it would be! We might see breakthroughs in international co-operation, from the grassroots popular level up. Nationalist isolationism would be relegated to the old farts (defined as one who has never twittered. Shit that's me.)

Yes I know there are unavoidable speed of light related latency issues with distance, but I'm saying that efforts should be made to make raw throughput (bandwidth) comparable from arbitra

I don't know much about the physical topology of the internet, but how come there isn't any redundancy the other way? String a few cables to Russia, to Asia through them. It seems to me like the Bering Strait would be a much shorter and simpler hop than the Mediterranean.

It's not "just a coincidence". It's common occurance. Cable cuts happen. All the time. It's just gotten a lot of attention lately because of the attached conspiracy theorists looking to "prove" that Bush was going to attack Iran (he didn't).

If it was an attack of some sort, don't you think they'd have cut all four?

Spoken by a true student of... er, no, not history that's for sure. This isn't a holocaust, it's a mere reconnaissance in force. Call me when they start burning over 20,000 people a day for the crime of "Not Being Israeli". THEN you'll have your holocaust.

Why do people scream "war crimes", "genocide" and "holocaust" all the time since the war in the Balkans? War is ugly. Chuck rockets at your neighbor and w

Besides, we all know the US and Canada will never come to blows. In the worst case scenario it will just be decided by a winner-take-all game of ice hockey. If the Americans win you'll see millions of people screaming "USA! USA! USA!" If we lose we'll just go back to watching football (no, not that [soccer.com] "football") because who gives a shit about ice hockey anyway?;)

The US is behind the IDF in smoke operations, even the non-controversial sort.

WP is the most effective obscurant. Note the burn times in the FAS link and consider how an advancing force needs to reduce enemy vision.If the IDF wanted to target civilians instead of merely accept the risk of injuring a few they'd have set the fuzes for ground burst.

Fun fact:The media like to show photos of airburst WP rounds (note the WP-impregnated felt sprinkling downwards) but generally does NOT show the thick clouds of smo